Review: “Three Days of Rain” (BoHo Theatre)

How well can we know our parents? Playwright Richard Greenberg is a student of the dysfunctional American family, and many of his plays examine the tantalizing and painful secrets held by mothers and fathers, none more theatrically than “Three Days of Rain,” now running in an excellent production mounted by BoHo Theatre. In his three-hander drama, the audience sees the end and then the beginning of a parent-child history, with the timeline shake-up only provoking more and more questions about the tentative bonds between family members.

Walker (Kyle Curry) is the unstable son of genius architect Ned (also played by Curry, but we’ll get to that). After his father’s death, he calls together his sister Nan (Kate Black-Spence) and childhood best friend Pip (Niko Kourtis), to alternately antagonize those who love him most, and get to the bottom of his father’s journal, recently discovered in the ramshackle building in which Ned is squatting. It turns out that this rundown two-room was the apartment shared by Ned and his fellow architect Theo (played by Kourtis) in their hungry days, as they cooked up the first design that won them accolades and fame in 1960’s New York. Walker wants nothing more than to understand his distant and silent father, but the journal yields few answers. After deciding to view his parents in a certain light, the play shifts perspectives, with the second act detailing how Ned came to fall in love with Walker and Nan’s mother Lina (played by Black-Spence). How the two come together is beyond the grasp of their children, just as the pair’s dreams for their children do not match up to the reality of raising them.

Greenberg rewards the audience and the actors with this second act flashback. Not only do offhand references from the first half gain deeper meaning, as with the play’s title, but the performers play in opposition to their roles in the first act. Whereas Walker is bombastic and motor-mouthed, Ned is shy and sympathetic. While Pip is extraordinarily genial and kind, Theo is bullying and egotistical. And though Nan is dependable and focused to a fault, her mother Lina always seems on the edge of an emotional breakdown. I imagine it is a treat for the actors to swap tones; it is certainly a treat to watch as they transform with detailed adjustments. By asking Curry and Black-Spence to play their own parents, Greenberg highlights the irony of how close we actually are to our own blood, even when we fail to see them properly. The audience gets to evaluate both sides of the same coin, and likely still leave the play wondering how much can be understood about the past.

Kate Black-Spence and Niko Kourtis/Photo by: Amy Boyle Photography.

Director Derek Van Barham (recently of American Folk Theatre’s dark “Trash”) uses space elegantly in both halves of the play. The combative nature of the present day scenes allows for sharp triangulation between the actors; based on who is the center of the triangle, one understands whose allegiance is being fought for. There is more furniture and less empty space in the play’s second act, but that makes every move matter more. As Curry and Black-Spence circle one another, edging closer and closer to a connection, tension fills the room. When Kourtis backs Curry into a literal corner, one’s sympathy aligns quickly and permanently with the quiet Ned.

Curry and Black-Spence share a lived-in brother-sister quality, but their chemistry comes alive in the play’s second act, with unspoken longings hovering between them and threatening to break them apart at any minute. Black-Spence does a particularly fine job highlighting Lina’s vulnerability. Lina is profoundly unstable in her children’s recollections, but Black-Spence centers her portrayal on the young woman’s efforts to keep her wits in the face of overwhelming criticism and misunderstanding. Her handling of a speech about Theo’s surface impressions of her really resonated on the night I sat in the audience.

G. “Max” Maxin IV’s lights buoy the direct address that occurs throughout the first act. His pink and blue hues give the speeches a dreamlike quality, as if the carefully constructed stories delivered by Curry, Black-Spence, and Kourtis are vital to understanding the children in the present. Kallie Rolison’s sound design transitions us from the present to the 1960’s with a few deft song choices, and Patrick Ham’s set transforms with only small touches that reveal how lived in this apartment was, for all parties.

When all is said and done, little objective truth is available in “Three Days of Rain.” Do the parents expect to scar their children so deeply? Do the children appreciate the sacrifices they dream up from their parents? BoHo’s fine production provides few answers, but the deep mysteries at work in something as simple as a few words haunt long after the audience exits the theater.

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